When telling people his surname, many people asked Saul - "Why Tarsus?"

I recently bought a pad of watercolour paper I hadn't used before. I wasn't sure what kind of marks I could make with it. It's quite evenly textured, but the texture isn't too rough, and by dragging a fairly dry brush flat across it, I was able to scumble some interesting patterns that reminded me of the sort of sandstone we came across in Morocco. With that in mind, I thought it would be a waste of paper if I didn't try to turn the random marks into some kind of picture, and I immediately thought of a Black- eared Wheatear as a suitable subject. As such, the painting was more of an experiment in texture and colour, than any conscious attempt at getting the details right. You can see that the shadow supposedly cast by the bird is not exactly coherent, and the structure of the rock wall too, is a bit too much like an Escher drawing - but I really was more interested in the colour palette of greys and oranges that typify the desert regions of the Maghreb.

Wheatears have always drawn my attention. They are proud birds, never afraid to perch out in the open for all to admire. of the dozen or so species in the western palearctic, I've been lucky enough to see most of them. All have their subtle idiosyncracies - variations in tail pattern, face mask and colour, and some can be tricky to tell apart. The Isabelline Wheatear is one that eluded me for a long time, but when I finally saw my first, up on the Norfolk coast, the second appeared only a few days later near Wardy Hill. I had always assumed they would be hard to tell from our far more common European Wheatear - but as it turns out, I think Desert Wheatear is a far more likely confusion species.

The European Wheatear is a regular sight on the Norfolk coast in Spring and Autumn, as well as a somewhat harder to find bird inland at the same time of year. Birds headed to Greenland are bigger and brighter than those that breed in this country, and boldly patrol the short sandy coastal turf or black fen fields for a day or two, before heading on. Now March has come back around, the Wheatears will soon be popping up again.